Westminster think tanks go in and out of vogue along with governments.
Rishi Sunak borrowed ideas from the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), co-founded by Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph in 1974. David Cameron preferred more modern organisations on the right, like Policy Exchange and Bright Blue founded in 2002 and 2014, respectively. Onward was set up to channel Boris Johnson’s “levelling up” agenda. And Liz Truss was so closely tied to the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) that its long-term director Mark Littlewood joined her in launching her “Popular Conservatives movement” after he stood down at the end of 2023.
Where, then, is Keir Starmer’s government getting its inspiration? In the centre of think tank land, tucked beside the Westminster Arms pub frequented by civil servants and political advisers (when it’s not being refurbished, anyway), lies the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). Founded in 1988 as a counterweight to the right-wing intellectualism being developed by the likes of the CPS and IEA, the IPPR’s mission is to revitalise thinking on the progressive left.
“We’ve barely had a moment where that’s more important,” Harry Quilter-Pinner tells me as we sit down for lunch in an Italian restaurant around the corner. He has worked at the think tank for nearly a decade, and was announced as its new executive director at the age of 32 at the start of the year, after Carys Roberts, who had run IPPR since 2020, joined No 10 as a special adviser. In liberal democracies around the world, an increasing number of voters are saying that the status quo of the past few generations – market-led globalisation, centrist politics – has failed them.
The challenge, not just for the Starmer government but for centre-left parties worldwide, is clear. “People feel their lives aren’t getting better, they don’t feel they have control over them, they don’t feel that the systems we’re creating are operating in their own interests,” Quilter-Pinner says. “Can we respond to those questions? Because if not, they will vote for parties that will smash those systems instead.” He pauses. “Our job is to make sure progressives have answers that are bold enough.”
So what does a radical progressive answer to the challenge of economic stagnation and political disengagement look like? Back in 2018, the IPPR published a report by its Commission on Economic Justice. It argued that the Thatcher, New Labour and post-2010 Conservative strategy of focusing on headline growth first and redressing economic inequalities through the benefit system later had failed. Instead, “economic justice needs to be ‘hard-wired’ into the way the economy works” through a more active industrial strategy that directs investment to regions that have missed out from the old model but have the potential to drive growth in key sectors, like green technology.
Fundamentally changing the economic model, Quilter-Pinner believes, is crucial for both kickstarting the economy and restoring people’s faith in mainstream politics. He points out the IPPR, which set up IPPR North in Manchester in 2004 and IPPR Scotland in 2014, has been talking about the need to rebalance Britain’s south-heavy economy long before Boris Johnson made “levelling up” a political catchphrase.
He suggests the government should be “intervening earlier to shape the distribution of economic activity, so there are good jobs and industries across the country, and so that everyone benefits from that growth from the start rather than hoping that redistribution later will deal with the unfairness”.
You could see this sentiment take hold in Labour before the election, from Starmer’s promise to get growth in every part of the country to Rachel Reeves’ focus on the “everyday economy”. Since getting into power, the message has become more muddled. First, the aim was rescuing the economy from the dire “Tory inheritance” even if that meant unpopular decisions such as withdrawing the winter fuel allowance for most pensioners. Now it is a “growth mindset”, with headline growth as the top priority, even if it is driven by projects in the already-prosperous south-east. In her growth speech on 29 January, Reeves announced a third runway at Heathrow and more investment around Oxford and Cambridge – exactly the kind of projects associated with the “broken growth model” the IPPR warned about.
“Labour’s central mission should be not just faster growth but also fairer growth,” Quilter-Pinner says in response to the Chancellor’s speech. In a column for the New Statesman, he argued that Reeves should focus as much on investment in the Midlands and the north as Oxford, Cambridge and Heathrow.
A week after the speech, the Bank of England turbocharged anxiety about the economy by downgrading the UK’s growth projections. This has fuelled murmurs that elements of Labour’s agenda might be watered down – parts of the regional industrial policy, or protections in the flagship Employment Rights Bill spearheaded by Angela Rayner, which have been met with scepticism by some in the business community. Much of the research on expanding workers’ rights was done by the IPPR – unsurprisingly, its director is passionate about implementing them. These measures, he argues, “are not just nice-to-haves. They are crucial to ensuring that the gains of growth are felt by everyone, everywhere.” The bill is currently awaiting report stage in the Commons; we’ll find out soon if the Chancellor agrees.
Placing IPPR within the Labour Party scene is an interesting challenge. Prominent IPPR alumni from the New Labour era include David Miliband and Patricia Hewitt, as well as Liz Kendall who worked for both Hewitt and Harriet Harman before becoming an MP herself in 2010. The 2024 intake of Labour MPs boasts an impressive number of figures associated with the think tank in various capacities. These include Miatta Fahnbulleh (junior minister in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero), Kirsty McNeill (junior minister in the Scotland Office), Hamish Falconer (junior minister in the Foreign Office), Yuan Yang, Luke Myer, Luke Murphy, Sarah Smith, Chris Murray and Josh Simons.
Simons, who was a policy researcher at IPPR for five months in 2015, is more commonly associated with running Labour Together, the high-profile (and sometimes controversial) organisation previously headed up by Morgan McSweeney and credited with both Keir Starmer’s winning leadership bid in 2021 and the 2024 election victory.
Quilter-Pinner (who insists he has no intention or desire of ever moving into front-line politics himself) is keen to distinguish the work IPPR does from Labour Together. “Firstly, we’re a charity, an independent organisation, so we’re not aligned to any political party – we work with all political parties,” he says, noting that Ed Davey and the Lib Dems have adopted key IPPR ideas like the social care pledge, which promises free personal care. Labour Together, in contrast, has the self-professed aim of helping the Labour Party get elected.
But the deeper difference, he argues, is that “fundamentally, we’re about ideas and policy and wonkery and changing the country, and Labour Together are about ‘how do Labour win?’” He pushes back on the idea that the two cater to different factions of the party, with Labour Together more on the right and IPPR drawing from the soft progressive left. “Someone once described Labour Together as Keir Starmer’s favourite think tank and the IPPR as Angela Rayner’s. Well, we work with both Keir and Angela – and everyone in between.”
Still, look at the ideas the think tank has been championing that made it on to ministers’ desks – the workers’ rights package, Ed Miliband’s green investment agenda, changing the fiscal rules to allow more borrowing to fix public services – and it’s not hard to see a pattern. As Quilter-Pinner puts it, “Just allowing your free-market economy to carry on the status quo is not working for anyone.”
There is something typical of the millennial experience in Quilter-Pinner’s route to leading a progressive think tank. He was a teenager at the time of the global financial crash in 2008, and experienced its aftermath while studying economics at York University. “The systematic failure that led to that,” he tells me, “and the lack of a response… that was the thing that really made me angry. It made me want to go into politics.” He briefly worked in the Foreign Office (not as a spy, he assures me), then at a local homelessness charity, but Westminster beckoned. “If you’re in the charity world… you’re just mopping up the shit of a bad system all the time, and there’s always a limit to what you can do.”
The other thing that motivated him was seeing firsthand how the opportunities available to his parents – the “magical social mobility that happened to that boomer generation”, as he puts it – got swept away. “They were in that magical generation where they were born working class, but by the time they’d finished their careers they were thoroughly middle class,” he says. His father, raised in a working-class household in Peterborough, was the first in his family to go to university and ended up becoming a playwright. Today, Quilter-Pinner says, “that kid wouldn’t make it to university. That kid would certainly not move from working class to middle class.”
This contributes to the sense of alienation that is driving voters in the UK away from mainstream politics. And it’s something, he warns, that mainstream centre-left parties across the world have yet to get a handle on. “As uncomfortable as it is for those of us who believe in liberalism and open societies, I think increasingly people feel that the form of globalisation, of liberalism, that we’ve pursued is challenging,” he says, citing both the transfer of power over recent decades from states to global bodies and organisations like the EU and the UN, as well as the rise in immigration. “It feels like progressives need better answers to the globalisation debate, the immigration debate… [they] have got themselves into positions where they’re defending the status quo.” The polls showing a rise in support for Reform – YouGov even has one survey putting Nigel Farage’s party ahead of Labour – are “a warning for progressive and centrist politics that says we are not answering the questions that people are posing to us”.
So how does he reckon Starmer and co are doing? Quilter-Pinner gives the government a rather generous seven and a half out of ten, based mainly on the Employment Rights Bill for workers and the fiscal rule changes announced by Reeves to increase public investment – something the IPPR had vocally campaigned on in the run-up to the Budget.
But he does acknowledge that the mood throughout the election campaign was “much more like REM’s ‘Everybody Hurts’ than D:Ream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ – and that has continued.” Probably not the soundtrack Labour will choose for its next party conference.
[See also: Reform is very wrong about net zero]
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